Changing weapons effects
How much customisation is possible for the beam weapons?
I have already played around with changing the location, arc, range, cycle time and damage of the beam weapons. I have made a ship with a weak, rapid-fire beam. (This particular weapon tends to overheat, so I guess that each shot generates a constant amount of heat, regardless of weapon.)
For example, I am interested in making a "super beam" that inflicts a large amount of damage, but takes 1 minute to cool down. I want to give it a blue beam to make it distinctive, make the beam fire for a few seconds, generate a large amount of heat, and would like to give it a unique firing sound. Is that possible?
What about weapons that fire "bolts" instead of beams? i.e. have a sprite or 3D model move from my ship to the target.
Comments
Energy is effected by shield frequencies. Kinetic is the default for explosion (missiles, nukes, mines), and EMP only damages shields.
Beams are currently always energy weapons, but no reason that couldn't be configurable.
Currently the beam weapons generate a fixed 2% heat per fire. And heat is only modeled for player ships, it does not effect AI ships. Could make this depended on the damage done with the weapon.
Beam weapons are currently always a cone/arc. And are always auto-fire.
So there are 5 properties that are currently "fixed" in the code that could be made dynamic in the future:
* Beam color
* Damage type
* Heat generation
* Straight line vs arc (arc of 0 deg might visually get this, but it will never fire)
* Auto vs manual fire
I submitted the change to the main code depository. This modification would enable setting the color either un the template script or on the fly.